Following that topic, I was reminded of an idea I had about constelations skills.
The starting point was that some celestial powers were either underperforming, either awkward to use, either balanced for early game and thus loosing quickly loosing steam. And while trying to think about how to make them “better”, I came to a very simple conclusion.
If we want to keep skills balanced both for early game at low rank and for endgame at high rank, and prevent those skills to get out of control if they were to rank up too quickly, why not just have different/modified devotion power ?
Those modifier could be locked to endgame through an altar/shrine/macguffin, allowing us to either strengthen the base skill, or just flat out chose an alternate one.
For exemple, what if instead of being a single hit on a low cooldown, Spear of the Heaven was a massive lasting AoE on a long cooldown ?
What if instead of a secondary health bar, Turtle Shell was a retalation skill ? Or what if Eldritch Fire was an moeratly sized AoE with %WD ?
And by locking them to an end game reward (end of base game or expac story reward), there would be no need to balance thoses skills for early game, we could just keep the current one.
Simplest solution requiring the least coding would be to just give the powers extra ranks so that you can make them stronger late.
But IMO that’s just power creep. Sure, devotion procs aren’t as powerful but we’re powerful enough. Adding more power to devo procs without taking any from the player just makes stuff easier.
I think Ceno and I tested this a while back and found that there is very little barrier to adding “skill modifiers” to constellation procs. Some items even thematically seem like they’d be very cool to be oriented toward buffing Devotion, like Cosmic Invoker.
Maybe they could also add a stat, “Devotion Damage Modified” that’s like TDM just for devotion procs.
It’s a very interesting concept but I don’t think it’s likely to be added to GD this late in game’s lifecycle. It’d take a lot of thought to do well, they wouldn’t want any particular constellation proc to be neglected, etc.
It’s something Ceno and I thought about with modding way back when. If you wanted it to be crazier, you could even make items that modified constellations also grant bonus affinity, allowing you to spread farther across the tree. Imagine pairing converted-to-cold meteor from Ulzuin’s Shower with Blizzard.
It’s a super cool idea, but it’d be a huge balance overhaul.
We still have actual mastery skills that have little support and less than stellar mechanics… Let alone trying to overhaul large portions of the devotion tree.
Something like this simply makes more sense for GD2, where there’s a new start and engine to expand on the devotion system. Creating new features that aren’t just proc skills to attach to your mastery skills, but also facilitating them with skills or other upgrade/modification avenues.
Like, you could have nodes that let you slot a skill in and it gets all damage types converted to a specific one (As a way to obfuscate the need for global conversion just to change a single skill, or multiple conversions for multi-typed skills).
Heck, you could take a page out of PoE’s book and have nodes that alter skills functionality (Like, having a totem that casts them or making them an aura, or a proc, or an active skill etc)
Basically, for GD2, the sky’s the limit for what they can do with the system.
For GD1, it would require a lot of work especially given the life cycle of the game (Whereby it’s almost at its end, with only a few more content patches and no more major releases before they transition over to GD2 development)
I agree that it would be a lot of work so late in the life of the game and that would make more sens to try to implement that in GD2, but it’s not impossible on a small scale (mods for some tier 1 and 2 devotions proc). And considering the whole Awakened Epic item endeavor, it seems that some people at Crate really don’t want to let the game rest.
I also simply wanted to make my voice heard about that idea and get a part of the community to give their though on it, so that Crate could get an idea of how “popular” or not that idea is. I know that popular does not mean good, but at least if people talk about something, that mean they’re interested.
But I must admit, I’m quite surprised celestial skills mods are not already a thing in GD with how prevalent skills modifiers are in the game.